again he refilled the tumbler, each time to the brim, and watched
it disappear down my throat. By this time my exploits were
attracting attention. Middle-aged Italian labourers, old-country
peasants who did not talk English, and who could not dance with
the Irish girls, surrounded me. They were swarthy and wild-
looking; they wore belts and red shirts; and I knew they carried
knives; and they ringed me around like a pirate chorus. And Peter
and Dominick made me show off for them.
Had I lacked imagination, had I been stupid, had I been stubbornly
mulish in having my own way, I should never have got in this
pickle. And the lads and lassies were dancing, and there was no
one to save me from my fate. How much I drank I do not know. My
memory of it is of an age-long suffering of fear in the midst of a
murderous crew, and of an infinite number of glasses of red wine
passing across the bare boards of a wine-drenched table and going
down my burning throat. Bad as the wine was, a knife in the back
was worse, and I must survive at any cost.
Looking back with the drinker’s knowledge, I know now why I did
not collapse stupefied upon the table. As I have said, I was
frozen, I was paralysed, with fear. The only movement I made was
to convey that never-ending procession of glasses to my lips. I
was a poised and motionless receptacle for all that quantity of
wine. It lay inert in my fear-inert stomach. I was too
frightened, even, for my stomach to turn. So all that Italian
crew looked on and marvelled at the infant phenomenon that downed
wine with the sang-froid of an automaton. It is not in the spirit
of braggadocio that I dare to assert they had never seen anything
like it.
The time came to go. The tipsy antics of the lads had led a
majority of the soberer-minded lassies to compel a departure. I
found myself, at the door, beside my little maiden. She had not
had my experience, so she was sober. She was fascinated by the
titubations of the lads who strove to walk beside their girls, and
began to mimic them. I thought this a great game, and I, too,
began to stagger tipsily. But she had no wine to stir up, while
my movements quickly set the fumes rising to my head. Even at the
start, I was more realistic than she. In several minutes I was
astonishing myself. I saw one lad, after reeling half a dozen
steps, pause at the side of the road, gravely peer into the ditch,
John Barleycorn
11
and gravely, and after apparent deep thought, fall into it. To me
this was excruciatingly funny. I staggered to the edge of the
ditch, fully intending to stop on the edge. I came to myself, in
the ditch, in process of being hauled out by several anxious-faced
girls.
I didn’t care to play at being drunk any more. There was no more
fun in me. My eyes were beginning to swim, and with wide-open
mouth I panted for air. A girl led me by the hand on either side,
but my legs were leaden. The alcohol I had drunk was striking my
heart and brain like a club. Had I been a weakling of a child, I
am confident that it would have killed me. As it was, I know I
was nearer death than any of the scared girls dreamed. I could
hear them bickering among themselves as to whose fault it was;
some were weeping–for themselves, for me, and for the disgraceful
way their lads had behaved. But I was not interested. I was
suffocating, and I wanted air. To move was agony. It made me
pant harder. Yet those girls persisted in making me walk, and it
was four miles home. Four miles! I remember my swimming eyes saw
a small bridge across the road an infinite distance away. In
fact, it was not a hundred feet distant. When I reached it, I
sank down and lay on my back panting. The girls tried to lift me,
but I was helpless and suffocating. Their cries of alarm brought
Larry, a drunken youth of seventeen, who proceeded to resuscitate
me by jumping on my chest. Dimly I remember this, and the
squalling of the girls as they struggled with him and dragged him
away. And then I knew nothing, though I learned afterward that
Larry wound up under the bridge and spent the night there.
When I came to, it was dark. I had been carried unconscious for
four miles and been put to bed. I was a sick child, and, despite
the terrible strain on my heart and tissues, I continually
relapsed into the madness of delirium. All the contents of the
terrible and horrible in my child’s mind spilled out. The most
frightful visions were realities to me. I saw murders committed,
and I was pursued by murderers. I screamed and raved and fought.
My sufferings were prodigious. Emerging from such delirium, I
would hear my mother’s voice: “But the child’s brain. He will
lose his reason.” And sinking back into delirium, I would take the
idea with me and be immured in madhouses, and be beaten by
keepers, and surrounded by screeching lunatics.
One thing that had strongly impressed my young mind was the talk
of my elders about the dens of iniquity in San Francisco’s
Chinatown. In my delirium I wandered deep beneath the ground
through a thousand of these dens, and behind locked doors of iron
I suffered and died a thousand deaths. And when I would come upon
my father, seated at table in these subterranean crypts, gambling
with Chinese for great stakes of gold, all my outrage gave vent in
the vilest cursing. I would rise in bed, struggling against the
detaining hands, and curse my father till the rafters rang. All
the inconceivable filth a child running at large in a primitive
countryside may hear men utter was mine; and though I had never
dared utter such oaths, they now poured from me, at the top of my
lungs, as I cursed my father sitting there underground and
gambling with long-haired, long-nailed Chinamen.
John Barleycorn
12
It is a wonder that I did not burst my heart or brain that night.
A seven-year-old child’s arteries and nerve-centres are scarcely
fitted to endure the terrific paroxysms that convulsed me. No one
slept in the thin, frame farm-house that night when John
Barleycorn had his will of me. And Larry, under the bridge, had
no delirium like mine. I am confident that his sleep was
stupefied and dreamless, and that he awoke next day merely to
heaviness and moroseness, and that if he lives to-day he does not
remember that night, so passing was it as an incident. But my
brain was seared for ever by that experience. Writing now, thirty
years afterward, every vision is as distinct, as sharp-cut, every
pain as vital and terrible, as on that night.
I was sick for days afterward, and I needed none of my mother’s
injunctions to avoid John Barleycorn in the future. My mother had
been dreadfully shocked. She held that I had done wrong, very
wrong, and that I had gone contrary to all her teaching. And how
was I, who was never allowed to talk back, who lacked the very
words with which to express my psychology–how was I to tell my
mother that it was her teaching that was directly responsible for
my drunkenness? Had it not been for her theories about dark eyes
and Italian character, I should never have wet my lips with the
sour, bitter wine. And not until man-grown did I tell her the
true inwardness of that disgraceful affair.
In those after days of sickness, I was confused on some points,
and very clear on others. I felt guilty of sin, yet smarted with
a sense of injustice. It had not been my fault, yet I had done
wrong. But very clear was my resolution never to touch liquor
again. No mad dog was ever more afraid of water than was I of
alcohol.
Yet the point I am making is that this experience, terrible as it
was, could not in the end deter me from forming John Barleycorn’s
cheek-by-jowl acquaintance. All about me, even then, were the
forces moving me toward him. In the first place, barring my
mother, ever extreme in her views, it seemed to me all the grown-
ups looked upon the affair with tolerant eyes. It was a joke,
something funny that had happened. There was no shame attached.
Even the lads and lassies giggled and snickered over their part in
the affair, narrating with gusto how Larry had jumped on my chest
and slept under the bridge, how So-and-So had slept out in the
sandhills that night, and what had happened to the other lad who